[buug] searching man pages w/i emacs (gnu/emacs os, redhat platform)

[Ian Zimmerman]

So, it has nothing to do with Emacs.  My faith can remain unshaken :-)

Jerry> Okay, retesting it's not the bold, it's specifically that the
Jerry> hypen in the man page is not a f'n hypen (ascii hex 2d), but
Jerry> for some reason hexl-mode shows mea b2, which is an extended
Jerry> ascii for a superscript 2.  It displays as a hyphen though.

There's no such thing as "extended ascii".  There are just many
mutually incompatible character sets and many mutually incompatible
ways of coding them into the 0x80-0xff space.  latin-1, also known as
iso-8859-1, which has the superscript 2 character in that position, is
just one of them, though the most common in Linux and Unix.  But even
now you can cause a different one to be used by setting your locale,
and a move to ISO 10646 (a superset of what is known as Unicode), is
afoot, coded with the utf-8 scheme, where non-ascii characters are
represented by multiple bytes in the 0x80-0xff range.

Jerry> Huh?  b2 and not a hyphen?  What is going on?

Looking at the same manpage here, I don't have that problem, either.

Does RH always format manpages on the fly (as Debian now does), or
does it still cache preformatted pages?  If it caches, have you tried
getting rid of the preformatted page and formatting it again?  By hand
if necessary, using something like

< /usr/share/man/man1/bash.1 tbl -Tascii | eqn -Tascii | nroff -Tascii -man

and varying the options to find the cause.

-- 
Ian Zimmerman, Oakland, California, U.S.A. 
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